“Don’t mess with the 5000 Years of Korean History™“

SEOUL, May 9 (Yonhap) — Education Minister Kim Shin-il delivered a letter to his Japanese counterpart Wednesday to protest Japan’s distortion of the two neighbors’ shared history in its school textbooks, ministry officials said.

In the letter addressed to Bummei Ibuki, the Japanese minister of education, sports, culture, science and technology, Kim, who is concurrently deputy prime minister, expressed concern over Tokyo’s approval of the textbooks, which distort historical facts, they said.

The action came after the Japanese government in late March endorsed high school textbooks for the 2008 school year that describe the South Korean islets of Dokdo as Japanese territory.

Most of the history textbooks that passed the screening made no mention of South Korean and other Asian women forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese army during World War II.

Commonly referred to as “comfort women,” about 200,000 young women were put in frontline brothels to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during their invasion of Asia in the last century. The majority of the victims were Koreans, whose country was colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945.

Kim sent the letter out of concern that the distortion would cause Japanese students to have an incorrect understanding of history and negatively affect friendly ties, according to the officials.

Dokdo has long been the target of Japan’s territorial claims. South Korea has stationed a police contingent on the islets since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War to symbolize its ownership. A married couple now resides there during the fishing reason.

One draft textbook originally depicted the issue of Dokdo’s ownership as being subject to ongoing negotiations with South Korea, but was reportedly changed at the Japanese ministry’s request during the screening procedures to say the territory belongs to Japan.

I just can’t stop laughing. I mean this is just pathetic. This happens every year or more often. I wonder how long South Korea will try to hide her own history….

History is politics in Korea, just like the president of ROK said so. I can almost see Ibuki goes like “Thank you for coming again. See ya next time soon lol”.